Garlic Forever

 http://www.facebook.com/david.s.warren  

  Non-stop, Dog's Plot, Scatter-Shot, Orchard crop of November Garlic...... some of which I will keep growing under plastic, some I will eat now, but leave most to grow until the ground freezes...which it hasn't done yet in January....then mulch if it does freeze, and allow it to mature next Spring.

 The weeds then will be mostly garlic, and I will eat them. The deer don't much care to.  The chickens and cats don't eat the garlic unless it is cooked, and then they love it.  And since I eat nothing  without a lot of  garlic( except for beer and ice cream), the deer and wood tics avoid me. 

Great Great Grandfather's Giant Red Wasps , and Other very brief Historical Recolections of the North Country

  Great Great grandfather Noah Davey, second son of Reverend Severn-Keel Davey, dropped out of Harvard Divnity school, and moved into Rose Cottage: the old home of his  Grandmother...and  he very quickly discovered that Rose Cottage had been taken over by giant, red Wasps, such as you never want to see.  The rest is history.

 

Serious Falls

 I have seen this falls on the Oswegatchie River ,with deep snow covering those fallen pines... and a deer path all the way across.  

When I was in my twenties or thirties my Dad and I were trout fishing here for the hundredth time.  I was standing about where I stood when I took this picture and watched as he slipped on the rock, into the sluice and got washed down to the pool. 

He shook it off pretty  well and we went on fishing up the river that day ..., but I knew  then that he could die, and ten or twenty years later, he did.

 

How Mule Deer Came to the Adirondacks

Granddad  and friends went to Texas and Mexico by train around nineteen hundred.... at a time when our Eastern Whitetail Deer were about extinct, and he came back with a a dozen sets of mule deer  horns...which were much bigger than our white tail horns.  He also brought a few set's of long horns and an occelot skin.  He was an ardent hunter-conservationist, when hunters were about the only conservationists, and helped do everything except backpack fawns into the woods, to help bring back the Whitetails.  Now there are more deer there than ever, and turkeys which weren't even there before.   Recently, Cougars have been seen in the Lake Bonaparte area.  

 I myself, haven't been up there for a few years now.

Rhinoceros Hills

Years and years ago, there was a story with a very long title, after which it got off to a very slow start, so we used to think would never end......which it nearly did.  See here:
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Confrontation in the Basil Patch

We are being watched by a thousand eyes....only some get very close.

In Olive's Garden

Why I Married a Chicken

   

   When I introduce visitors   to my wife Olive, most of them pretend not to notice that she's a chicken , and are too polite to ask  why   I married outside my species.  So let me explain.            
                    First of all:  our relationship is not about sex.  Get that out of your mind.   Ours is a marriage of   mutual benefits and general convenience.   Of course it is more convenient for Olive than for me, and unfortunately, eggs are not one of the  benefits.   Hens, like other women,  are born with  a limited number of ovaries to let down in a life tIme -  around three hundred and fifty for a hen  - but Olive stopped laying long before reaching that limit, no doubt as a result of her abuse by the other chickens.

    I don't know if it was the roosters or the hens who ganged up on her,  but   one morning during the first year of the flock,   I   found her lying in a corner of the coop, beaten nearly flat.
  She is a Dominker, which is a breed common in the nineteenth century, before Asian varieties were bred into the European stock, and different enough in feathering     and comb that the other   chickens   discriminate, to say the least.  Her several brother Domikers had already been driven by the other roosters to the periphery of the flock, where they have not survived.
    
    I carried  her up to the house and set her in a box on the floor by the chair where I write.
         I put her food in a bowl on the kitchen floor along side the dog dishes, but each evening at roosting time she  insisted on climbing up over my lap to spend the night on the back of my chair,  The gallon can of Olive Oil  sits on the shelf  behind her.  And so, she became Olive.

     After a week or two,   I tried to  reintroduce her into the chicken coop....but the hens immediately attacked her, so I brought her back to the house.
          And  when I put her out among the ranging hens, she  would immediately fly at them in  like a hopped up rooster in a cock fight.  

        She had less of an aversion to the roosters, and would occasionally offer herself to one of the favorites I sometimes allowed into the house.
  She  also started crowing occasionally......never the complete phrasing, but two thirds of it, which is more than I have ever heard from the other hens.
         My mother used to say, "Whistling girls and crowing hens, always come to some bad end." But there isn't much I could do about it.
      The crowing behavior first began when I would leave the house.... or even the room. 
           She would also crow sometimes when I sang.  This first occurred   a couple of years ago when I began doing my weekly video weather report for the Tiny Town Times.  She was usually sitting on the back of my chair when I recorded the sitting down portion of the video, so I incorporated her in it, as Olive the Weather Hen. 
 
           I guess that was a good move.  Olive became  famous, with more fans than  me  in my role as  Davey Weathercock,  and she  aroused more interest than the  substance of my weather comentery.
         For a while ,  before the economic crash, we made a  weekly salary which kept us  in chicken feed and wine, for which Olive has developed a taste.   We entertained a number of eminent Olive seeking pilgrims. 
    

   They don't love her any better than I do.  Olive is an indiscriminate, serial pooper, but a fussy housekeeper otherwise, and spends hours a day poking around, examining small objects and specks of nothing much, and generally policing  the floor.  She even caught a mouse in here once, and always grumbles when one is heard gnawing in the walls or when one flits across the floor. Or imagines that she does. We share meals and maybe a nip of wine.  When I write, she is at my feet or at my head.  Her influence on my writing is obvious.

       Waking mornings, we talk for a while  her language mostly, between my bed and her roost.  If I don't get up soon enough, she will come off her  roost, waddle across the room and fly up onto my stomach.

Then I have about five minutes to roll out and get her some breakfast (chopped cabbage usually)  and if I don't, she takes her morning dump on me.
     Sure I  have some cause for resentment,and I am quite tied down here by my obligations to her,  but it is all by choice and I would have only my own choices to blame.  I could have eaten her long ago,   She sheds feathers on a regular schedule and I collect them in a bread bag.  I already have enough to make the illusion of a replacement Olive, but of course, a bag of feathers, or even a whistling girl could never replace Olive.  

 
            

First Truths

When I was  five, the world was round on the bottom, and   flat on the top, with a plastic dome to keep people from going off the edge.
       I stayed  close  to home , but  started an exploratory hole to China.  That attempt  didn't get further than the hard pan,  but I also explored gravity and travel very briefly, by tying on a towel for a cape and trying to fly off the roof of the Bray's chicken house.    
  Clara Bray, the chickens, and her parents, whom I don't remember ever seeing,   lived up the road on the edge of the village .
           One day  little Clara   wandered into our yard where I was playing, and told me    her mom and daddy were not home, and that she  knew zactly where her daddy kept  his bullets ....... so we could  take some out back and splode them.

     The box of 30.30 cartridges was on a shelf behind the door at the top of the cellar stairs.
        We  took a few and  went  way out back , where we put the cartridges on a rock and threw stones at them.
               This experiment also failed,  and  we  wandered on a little further toward the horizon.
     We soon came to hedge row where  three kids a little older than us were watching a brother  and sister; she on her back and he sitting on top,   trying to push his  limp dinky into her girl  thingy..... but there was nothing doing with that experiment either.

      Clara went home  and   I headed back too, but our family friend, the widow Manie Lyons, saw me passing through her back yard, and  brought me inside for milk and a cookie, then walked me home.
          Mom had thought  all that time that I was still out in the garden with my grandfather and the dog.

     My grandparents lived next door to our own house, which  had been my Great Grandfather's and the location of his medical practice.  My mother had been born there.
  I  didn't understand houses to be built by people, but more like  living  things which engendered and sheltered humans. 
 The next year we would move  to Ithaca...... a long drive from the center of the world ..... and   I didn't imagine we could move without the house .   I asked my mother how  exactly it would happen,   and  I was sure for years afterward that she told me  a big wind machine would come and blow it the house onto a truck.
  I was bitterly disappointed when the day came and we left  the house behind.

 There had been no preschool or kindergarten in Natural Bridge, so when I entered school for the first time in Ithaca,   I was a slow learner in everything with letters or numbers in it.... but when a teacher with a  grapefruit and oranges represented the solar system and the motions of the planets, it made  better sense to me than the old half-dome model.  And not long after, when another teacher used the same fruits   to show atoms  with orbiting electrons and so on, something in me clicked and  I  realized that  the stuff of the world is  the same    on the inside, as it is on the outside:  a fractal universe,   This made    perfect  sense of gravity and  most  everything  but  sex,  death, and time.